Sunday, 14th of June, 2009

Tonight’s big event was the broadcast of Sydney musician/sound artist Roger Mills‘ incredible multi-stream project Idea of South (more info at the link).
We started with an Iranian lullaby from the new Kronos Quartet album, apposite tonight as Iran seems on the brink of revolution after the shamefully (if not surprisingly) rigged election results. Realtime info has been available on Twitter, even while little appeared in the mainstream media.
Not in any way related, the track that followed was from Townsville’s wonderful indie-folk-thingy band The Middle East. A band to watch, if ever there was one.
I’ve been playing a lot of Sweet Billy Pilgrim lately, and was finally able this week to play something from their first album. Beautiful stuff, if not quite as scintillating as the new one.
Another track, also, from the inspired collaboration between chris weisman & greg davis – quirky (if not downright kooky) songs from Weisman, expanded, broken up and refracted through Greg Davis’s superb production.
After the Idea of South broadcast, two more tracks from Scanner‘s new album, both sampling vocals of one sort or another, and separated by Dublin’s Herv, longtime resident of Utility Fog’s playlists courtesy of the very broad range of influences he brings to his electronica.
Two drum’n’bass tracks on Exit Records, as I got hold of the new Survival album this week. After dBridge‘s excellent album last year, I hoped this would be good and it sure is. Signs that there’s still life in the d’n’b scene – it’s not just big pop anthems and rewinds.
A reprise of Sydney trio forced perspective‘s excellent three-track EP from last year – hopefully an album’s on the way from these guys.
Only fitted in one track from Dirty Projectors tonight, one of any number of highlights from the new album. Maybe next week I’ll fit in a couple of older tracks and at least one new one. Much though I’m enjoying it, I think we’ll avoid the more Led Zep-influenced tracks for this show :)
A very fine track from Sydney’s Dead Letter Chorus, remixing themselves in collaboration with their now-ex-bassist Andrew Rose. A good indie band remix can work wonders, and this is lovely stuff.
One of a couple of older things I picked up this week, Re:‘s track comes from their second album on Constellation – predominantly field recordings, drones and clattering beats, but this track has beautiful piano chords in amongst it all. Meanwhile, Orla Wren‘s album is quintessential folktronica, the quietest kind – you’ll be hearing more of this in coming weeks.
Sydney’s Nadene Pita, a violist and singer, just released her debut album, recorded in collaboration with the fabulous Tony Dupé, and we took a beautiful wordless improvisatory piece, with loops and skittery jazz drums. It was followed by more strings, from an amazing drone album of Jim O’Rourke‘s from the early ’90s.
Another track (see last week) from koen park‘s remixes (etc) album, in which he remixes Japanese shoegaze band all apologies with some rather lovely stringy sounds, leads into more string drone, from A Broken Consort – one of the better-known monikers of Richard Skelton.
And we finished off with some post-classical music of a rather different bent, math baroque maybe? From last year’s album by Pattern Is Movement, very cool (alright, maybe “cool” is not the right word…)

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email: utilityfog at frogworth dot com
Utility Fog teeters on the cusp between acoustic and electronic, organic and digital. Constantly changing and rearranging, this aural cloud of nanotech consumes genres and spits them out in new forms. Whether cataloguing the jungle resurgence, tracking the ups and downs of noise and drone, or unearthing the remnants of glitch and folktronica, all is contextualised within artist & genre histories for a fulfilling sonic journey.
Since all these genre names are already pretty ridiculous, we thought we'd coin a new one. So "postfolkrocktronica" it is. Wear it.